Summary: Storage­Aware Caching:
Revisiting Caching for Heterogeneous Storage Systems
Brian C. Forney Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin, Madison
{bforney,dusseau,remzi}@cs.wisc.edu
Abstract
Modern storage environments are composed of a vari­
ety of devices with different performance characteris­
tics. In this paper, we explore storage­aware caching
algorithms, in which the file buffer replacement algo­
rithm explicitly accounts for differences in performance
across devices. We introduce a new family of storage­
aware caching algorithms that partition the cache, with
one partition per device. The algorithms set the parti­
tion sizes dynamically to balance work across the de­
vices. Through simulation, we show that our storage­
aware policies perform similarly to LANDLORD, a cost­
aware algorithm previously shown to perform well in
Web caching environments. We also demonstrate that